Of all the surprises that have popped up at the 96th Academy Awards ceremony thus far, the single greatest of them just might be this brand new, entirely wholesome approach to honoring the acting nominees this time around.
For those you that have not or will not tune in, this ceremony has seen each nominee receive a personal address by a past winner of the corresponding award, imbuing the event with an even more heightened sense of camaraderie then tends to already be present.
One of these addressers was one Sam Rockwell, who was part of the group who introduced the nominees for Best Supporting Actor, and who paid some cheeky but brotherly respects to eventual winner Robert Downey Jr., who soon after nabbed the award for his turn in Oppenheimer as Lewis Strauss.
So, what exactly earned Rockwell the right to be up there?
What did Sam Rockwell win an Academy Award for?
The illustrious Sam Rockwell won his own Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor back in 2018 on the back of an evocatively multi-pronged performance in 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, where he played the role of Jason Dixon, a corrupt policeman who unwittingly finds himself on a path to redemption following the suicide of Bill Willoughby, the police chief of the titular setting.
Rockwell’s fellow nominees included his Missouri castmate Woody Harrelson (who portrayed Willoughby), as well as Willem Dafoe (The Florida Project), Richard Jenkins (The Shape of Water), and Christopher Plummer (All the Money in the World).